6 ms·

I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything I need

I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping window manager in the first place.

NullPrefix 8y ago
You know that there's multiple virtual desktops, right?
- kstenerud 8y ago
  ... which doesn't solve the underlying problem. I don't want to switch to a different desktop, such that my text editor window disappears and my terminal appears. I want them both on the same screen, along with my browser which points to a SO answer, in big sizes. In a normal window manager, this is accomplished by making them all big and then either overlapping them in ways that makes it easy to click on them, or just alt-tab. In a tiling window manager, this doesn't seem possible as far as I've been able to tell.
  - mattbreeden 8y ago
    I can't tell if you were aware by your comments, but in a tiling window manager you don't have to have everything visible all the time. They all have modes that hide windows behind others and allow you to swap between them the same as alt-tab. Many of them also have the option to 'float' the windows as a normal non tiling window manager would.
    - kstenerud 8y ago
      But then I fail to see what benefit it's giving me to be a tiling window manager?
      - lfms_dotfile 8y ago
        That's simply an option, because the devs recognize that not everything adheres well to a tiling workflow. It's not intended to be the primary mode of operation. I personally almost never use floating mode.
      - ozzyman700 8y ago
        Better default window behavior. I do not need to use a mouse with i3.
        kstenerud 8y ago
        That's another point of difference, then. I love the mouse! And the default window behavior is appealing to me.
  - the_gipsy 8y ago
    So you want to go to an app. You just hope that some corner is peeking out of that huge unsorted pile of windows. You call that good UX or is it just a formed habit?
    - kstenerud 8y ago
      Precisely. I arrange them such that I can click in the corner I need to get what I want, and then alt-tab between them, or click for the specific one I want if I need to jump. Then I get big real estate, and easy access. I call that good UX because it works well for me.
      - the_gipsy 8y ago
        I don't think it's "easy access" nor "big real estate". But to each their own.
      - lfms_dotfile 8y ago
        You can enable tabbed mode for a split (or the entire screen) in i3/Sway with a single keypress-- it produces the same effect as what you describe, just automated. edit: You can also use something like rofi to fuzzy search for windows and quickly jump to them, instead of alt+tabbing.
    - hnra 8y ago
      There are more ways than clicking a window to give it focus. Alt-Tab being the obvious once but also Win+{Nr} on Windows if I recall correctly.
      - the_gipsy 8y ago
        Alt-tab works fine as "go back to last window", but that could just be a specific shortcut. Using it to cycle through a pile of apps shown as icons or screenshots is terrible UX, IMHO.
  - black-tea 8y ago
    > In a tiling window manager, this doesn't seem possible as far as I've been able to tell. It's not and it completely defeats the purpose of it. Sounds like you shouldn't use a tiling window manager.
  - kingaillas 8y ago
    I love tiling window managers. I spent way too much time in non-tiling managers optimizing window sizes and so on - basically my 80% usage is to split the screen in half, one app on the left, one on the right. This is basically what I do at work on a Windows system, using the drag-to-left and drag-to-right. For your example case, I'd split the screen with my editor taking up the left half, the split the right half into upper and lower, with SO answer in top half and terminal in bottom half. That's the quick and easy split, I could also fiddle with resizing (using arrow keys) the split a bit left/right or up/down. This gets the info all visible at the same time, without clicking or tabbing to bring one window at a time to the top. The usage I described above is what I do on my work machine using i3. I'm gonna try out sway now that it's 1.0!
colordrops 8y ago
I get the opposite feeling. I feel like I'm in a trash dump when I use an overlapping window manager, and have to sort through the pile to find what I need. Tiling window managers perhaps make more sense for devs or other professionals who use several of the same applications every day and know what window and pane they will be on, and can switch quickly with keystrokes. That being said, once you internalize the model and key bindings, it's not restrictive at all and can work for the general case as well, and actually feels freeing rather than boxed in. And there is always the option to break a window out from tiles and overlap if you so wish.
- kstenerud 8y ago
  What I usually want to do is just click and resize to something that "feels right" for each of my programs, and then flip between them as needed, then resize again later as I workflow progresses. Often I want some important text from one to be visible while I'm working in another (thus overlapping), so I jockey them around until it feels right, and go.
  - snazz 8y ago
    You might like the minimal tiling present in CWM (and likely other window managers, too). Basically, it is a regular old overlapping window manager but with keyboard commands as the primary control. If you have two or more windows you want to see on the screen at the same time tiling style, simply press the hotkey for either vertical or horizontal (Super+v for me). When I want to open a terminal window on top of a browser, pressing Super+enter puts it at the mouse cursor, scaled to the application’s default size. For many terminal windows or one Emacs and one terminal, I might use tiling, but I can still overlap whenever it makes more sense. Plus, the consistent keyboard controls (I use a config pretty similar to https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/#cwm https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/#cwm) make me more efficient than a mouse interface.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    Funny enough that's precisely my use case for tiling window managers. I'm often referencing one app to do work in another, and often one is just a bit too overlapped to see what I need, and I also need to lay windows out every time I do this work. With a tiling window manager, you can be sure that your app is not obfuscated, and there are various adjustments you can make to pane size and layout to get the right amount of screen space and positioning for apps. You can also save and restore layouts for particulars workflows.
totony 8y ago
a cool feature youll probably like is in tilling vms you can use stacked/tabbed views to get those benefits
- kstenerud 8y ago
  Tried that, but then I can't have an important part of a SO answer visible while I work in my editor to play around with stuff, while watching the terminal churn away some stuff in a partially obscured window such that I can see when it finishes.
  - mattbreeden 8y ago
    You can float windows in i3 if you wanted to do this. I also have a hotkey to make my window 80% transparent so I can reference docs while keeping my editor fullscreen. But yeah, if that's your big use case, seems like you just prefer non-tiling workflows.
ilovecaching 8y ago
I mostly switch between a full screen terminal and a full screen browser. The benefit of tiling is that when the browser opens a popup, or I need to look at my terminal next to my browser it's super simple. You just shift the browser to the workspace with the terminal with a keypress. Then when you are done you shift it back. Tiling is simply more efficient it drives you into a keyboard based workflow that makes the most efficient use of your screen real estate. You can still have floating windows in Sway, or tabs for that matter as well when you need them.
- kstenerud 8y ago
  I suppose it's a matter of personality, then. That kind of workflow would drive me nuts.
  - ilovecaching 8y ago
    But there's nothing different between your workflow and my workflow except you have to manually resize your windows on each workspace. Sway just does it for me and I can save the layouts.
    - oblio 8y ago
      > But there's nothing different between your workflow and my workflow except for the fact that our workflows are completely different. Is it so hard to accept that there are different ways of using a computer and your perceived increase in efficiency might not pan out for everyone? :)
      - ilovecaching 8y ago
        I don't accept that it isn't immediately obvious that tiling is more efficient than dragging to maximize real estate on a single workspace. If someone wants to use an inferior method because that's what they are comfortable with that is fine. Just don't assert that the two are equal without some reasoned argument.
xf86alsa 8y ago
Ideally you'd be using multiple workspaces, and only have 1-4 windows on a single given one. I like to organize my workspaces by a category of activity. I'll have one per project I'm currently working on, then one for communications (Email, Chat, etc) one for web-browsing, etc. I try to keep the non-project ones consistent, so at any point I can, say, tap Meta-9 and instantly be brought a web browser on Workspace 9.
sevensor 8y ago
Funny, I feel the same way about overlapping WMs. I think it comes down to how different people perceive space. Vive la difference!
yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago
The one place where I prefer stacking window managers is that I can have a transparent terminal/editor floating over the docs. Stacking things on top of each other while being able to see all of them is pretty nice.
- narimiran 8y ago
  > I can have a transparent terminal/editor floating over the docs Easily done even with a tiling WM. E.g. I have a keybinding which allows me switching between tiling and floating of a window.
DCKing 8y ago
With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them. With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less. You open a program, get a window with focus somewhere. You can start doing your thing immediately without considering window management. Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using. Subsequently organizing the layout of your windows to be optimized for your current workload however takes more time. This appears to me to make stacking window managers to be more suited for people whose computer use is more dynamic or less organized - people can open and close stuff on a whim. More organized vs. less cognitive load can be both a personal preference or a workload dependant thing. In case of tiling WMs it also doesn't help that they tend to have very low discoverability and depend almost exclusively on keyboard shortcuts versus GUI elements, only adding to their newbie-unfriendliness. I think that's also telling about the use cases tiling WMs are popular for. I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  What I've been thinking is, why can't we have both? Imagine just two changes: a workspace's mode can be switched between tiling and floating, and additional workspaces are just windows. Now you can have any combination of floating and tiling that makes sense to you. You could, for instance, set your desktop to tiling mode and open two new workspace windows, the switch one to floating and run your GUI desktop stuff on the left side of the screen and several terminal tiles on the right.
  - irth 8y ago
    I think AwesomeWM allows that
black-tea 8y ago
It does require having the multiple desktop paradigm deeply embedded in your fingertips. I always used full screen windows and multiple desktops so switching to a tiling WM was natural and allowed me to use my available screen space much more efficiently.
type0 8y ago
tiling wm is great when you have big screen with good resolution
- amelius 8y ago
  I always code with two slightly overlapping windows, and quickly switch between them using alt-tab. I can't imagine a tiling WM to be an improvement, to be honest, because it will make my coding windows smaller. I'm curious about the other features, though.

NullPrefix 8y ago

You know that there's multiple virtual desktops, right?

kstenerud 8y ago
... which doesn't solve the underlying problem. I don't want to switch to a different desktop, such that my text editor window disappears and my terminal appears. I want them both on the same screen, along with my browser which points to a SO answer, in big sizes. In a normal window manager, this is accomplished by making them all big and then either overlapping them in ways that makes it easy to click on them, or just alt-tab. In a tiling window manager, this doesn't seem possible as far as I've been able to tell.
- mattbreeden 8y ago
  I can't tell if you were aware by your comments, but in a tiling window manager you don't have to have everything visible all the time. They all have modes that hide windows behind others and allow you to swap between them the same as alt-tab. Many of them also have the option to 'float' the windows as a normal non tiling window manager would.
  - kstenerud 8y ago
    But then I fail to see what benefit it's giving me to be a tiling window manager?
    - lfms_dotfile 8y ago
      That's simply an option, because the devs recognize that not everything adheres well to a tiling workflow. It's not intended to be the primary mode of operation. I personally almost never use floating mode.
    - ozzyman700 8y ago
      Better default window behavior. I do not need to use a mouse with i3.
      - kstenerud 8y ago
        That's another point of difference, then. I love the mouse! And the default window behavior is appealing to me.
- the_gipsy 8y ago
  So you want to go to an app. You just hope that some corner is peeking out of that huge unsorted pile of windows. You call that good UX or is it just a formed habit?
  - kstenerud 8y ago
    Precisely. I arrange them such that I can click in the corner I need to get what I want, and then alt-tab between them, or click for the specific one I want if I need to jump. Then I get big real estate, and easy access. I call that good UX because it works well for me.
    - the_gipsy 8y ago
      I don't think it's "easy access" nor "big real estate". But to each their own.
    - lfms_dotfile 8y ago
      You can enable tabbed mode for a split (or the entire screen) in i3/Sway with a single keypress-- it produces the same effect as what you describe, just automated. edit: You can also use something like rofi to fuzzy search for windows and quickly jump to them, instead of alt+tabbing.
  - hnra 8y ago
    There are more ways than clicking a window to give it focus. Alt-Tab being the obvious once but also Win+{Nr} on Windows if I recall correctly.
    - the_gipsy 8y ago
      Alt-tab works fine as "go back to last window", but that could just be a specific shortcut. Using it to cycle through a pile of apps shown as icons or screenshots is terrible UX, IMHO.
- black-tea 8y ago
  > In a tiling window manager, this doesn't seem possible as far as I've been able to tell. It's not and it completely defeats the purpose of it. Sounds like you shouldn't use a tiling window manager.
- kingaillas 8y ago
  I love tiling window managers. I spent way too much time in non-tiling managers optimizing window sizes and so on - basically my 80% usage is to split the screen in half, one app on the left, one on the right. This is basically what I do at work on a Windows system, using the drag-to-left and drag-to-right. For your example case, I'd split the screen with my editor taking up the left half, the split the right half into upper and lower, with SO answer in top half and terminal in bottom half. That's the quick and easy split, I could also fiddle with resizing (using arrow keys) the split a bit left/right or up/down. This gets the info all visible at the same time, without clicking or tabbing to bring one window at a time to the top. The usage I described above is what I do on my work machine using i3. I'm gonna try out sway now that it's 1.0!

colordrops 8y ago

I get the opposite feeling. I feel like I'm in a trash dump when I use an overlapping window manager, and have to sort through the pile to find what I need. Tiling window managers perhaps make more sense for devs or other professionals who use several of the same applications every day and know what window and pane they will be on, and can switch quickly with keystrokes. That being said, once you internalize the model and key bindings, it's not restrictive at all and can work for the general case as well, and actually feels freeing rather than boxed in. And there is always the option to break a window out from tiles and overlap if you so wish.

kstenerud 8y ago
What I usually want to do is just click and resize to something that "feels right" for each of my programs, and then flip between them as needed, then resize again later as I workflow progresses. Often I want some important text from one to be visible while I'm working in another (thus overlapping), so I jockey them around until it feels right, and go.
- snazz 8y ago
  You might like the minimal tiling present in CWM (and likely other window managers, too). Basically, it is a regular old overlapping window manager but with keyboard commands as the primary control. If you have two or more windows you want to see on the screen at the same time tiling style, simply press the hotkey for either vertical or horizontal (Super+v for me). When I want to open a terminal window on top of a browser, pressing Super+enter puts it at the mouse cursor, scaled to the application’s default size. For many terminal windows or one Emacs and one terminal, I might use tiling, but I can still overlap whenever it makes more sense. Plus, the consistent keyboard controls (I use a config pretty similar to https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/#cwm https://www.c0ffee.net/blog/openbsd-on-a-laptop/#cwm) make me more efficient than a mouse interface.
- colordrops 8y ago
  Funny enough that's precisely my use case for tiling window managers. I'm often referencing one app to do work in another, and often one is just a bit too overlapped to see what I need, and I also need to lay windows out every time I do this work. With a tiling window manager, you can be sure that your app is not obfuscated, and there are various adjustments you can make to pane size and layout to get the right amount of screen space and positioning for apps. You can also save and restore layouts for particulars workflows.

totony 8y ago

a cool feature youll probably like is in tilling vms you can use stacked/tabbed views to get those benefits

kstenerud 8y ago
Tried that, but then I can't have an important part of a SO answer visible while I work in my editor to play around with stuff, while watching the terminal churn away some stuff in a partially obscured window such that I can see when it finishes.
- mattbreeden 8y ago
  You can float windows in i3 if you wanted to do this. I also have a hotkey to make my window 80% transparent so I can reference docs while keeping my editor fullscreen. But yeah, if that's your big use case, seems like you just prefer non-tiling workflows.

ilovecaching 8y ago

I mostly switch between a full screen terminal and a full screen browser. The benefit of tiling is that when the browser opens a popup, or I need to look at my terminal next to my browser it's super simple. You just shift the browser to the workspace with the terminal with a keypress. Then when you are done you shift it back. Tiling is simply more efficient it drives you into a keyboard based workflow that makes the most efficient use of your screen real estate. You can still have floating windows in Sway, or tabs for that matter as well when you need them.

kstenerud 8y ago
I suppose it's a matter of personality, then. That kind of workflow would drive me nuts.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  But there's nothing different between your workflow and my workflow except you have to manually resize your windows on each workspace. Sway just does it for me and I can save the layouts.
  - oblio 8y ago
    > But there's nothing different between your workflow and my workflow except for the fact that our workflows are completely different. Is it so hard to accept that there are different ways of using a computer and your perceived increase in efficiency might not pan out for everyone? :)
    - ilovecaching 8y ago
      I don't accept that it isn't immediately obvious that tiling is more efficient than dragging to maximize real estate on a single workspace. If someone wants to use an inferior method because that's what they are comfortable with that is fine. Just don't assert that the two are equal without some reasoned argument.

xf86alsa 8y ago

Ideally you'd be using multiple workspaces, and only have 1-4 windows on a single given one. I like to organize my workspaces by a category of activity. I'll have one per project I'm currently working on, then one for communications (Email, Chat, etc) one for web-browsing, etc. I try to keep the non-project ones consistent, so at any point I can, say, tap Meta-9 and instantly be brought a web browser on Workspace 9.

sevensor 8y ago

Funny, I feel the same way about overlapping WMs. I think it comes down to how different people perceive space. Vive la difference!

yjftsjthsd-h 8y ago

The one place where I prefer stacking window managers is that I can have a transparent terminal/editor floating over the docs. Stacking things on top of each other while being able to see all of them is pretty nice.

narimiran 8y ago
> I can have a transparent terminal/editor floating over the docs Easily done even with a tiling WM. E.g. I have a keybinding which allows me switching between tiling and floating of a window.

DCKing 8y ago

With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them. With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less. You open a program, get a window with focus somewhere. You can start doing your thing immediately without considering window management. Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using. Subsequently organizing the layout of your windows to be optimized for your current workload however takes more time. This appears to me to make stacking window managers to be more suited for people whose computer use is more dynamic or less organized - people can open and close stuff on a whim. More organized vs. less cognitive load can be both a personal preference or a workload dependant thing. In case of tiling WMs it also doesn't help that they tend to have very low discoverability and depend almost exclusively on keyboard shortcuts versus GUI elements, only adding to their newbie-unfriendliness. I think that's also telling about the use cases tiling WMs are popular for. I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
What I've been thinking is, why can't we have both? Imagine just two changes: a workspace's mode can be switched between tiling and floating, and additional workspaces are just windows. Now you can have any combination of floating and tiling that makes sense to you. You could, for instance, set your desktop to tiling mode and open two new workspace windows, the switch one to floating and run your GUI desktop stuff on the left side of the screen and several terminal tiles on the right.
- irth 8y ago
  I think AwesomeWM allows that

black-tea 8y ago

It does require having the multiple desktop paradigm deeply embedded in your fingertips. I always used full screen windows and multiple desktops so switching to a tiling WM was natural and allowed me to use my available screen space much more efficiently.

type0 8y ago

tiling wm is great when you have big screen with good resolution

amelius 8y ago
I always code with two slightly overlapping windows, and quickly switch between them using alt-tab. I can't imagine a tiling WM to be an improvement, to be honest, because it will make my coding windows smaller. I'm curious about the other features, though.